This paper theorizes about the organizing of online citizen collaboration. The setting is an Internet forum where people started their own investigations about a crime of animal cruelty. The concepts of commons-based peer production and generativity are utilized to analyse the complex organizing mechanisms of voluntaristic online collaboration in practice. Three general functions are introduced - operational, managerial, and noise - which are intertwined and together make up important basis for organizing generativity. © Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Facultad de Economía y Negocios.